Teaching Early Childhood Education Students through Interactive Scenario-Based Course Design

Overview & Synopsis

Early childhood teacher education courses must prepare students for the types of challenges they will face in communities and classrooms after graduation. By adopting a scenario-based approach, teacher educators and others designing online environments can help prepare students for these challenges. Solving complex problems inherent in a scenario-based approach affords students the opportunity to tackle ill-formed problems, integrate multiple perspectives, and use higher order thinking. These outcomes were among the goals of a redesign of online courses in an early childhood education degree program. After presenting an overview of scenario-based instruction and the principles guiding the redesign, the authors describe how a scenario-based approach can be applied to an online graduate course and outline a course development process for other instructors. (Contains 4 figures.)